When state failure brings international rewards

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Chellaney

Threaten to become a failed state, and reap a mass of aid

Pakistan deftly exploits international fears over its becoming a failed state to rake in an ever-growing mound of bilateral and multilateral aid, even as the Indian prime minister gratuitously certifies “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands as of now”

Brahma Chellaney, Asian Age, April 22, 2009

Pakistan has long proved to be adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid.

Bountiful aid has been pouring in without any requirement that Pakistan address the root cause of its emergence as the epicentre of global terrorism — a state-instilled jihad culture and military-created terrorist outfits and militias. Even though the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad, rewards are being showered on the procreators of terrorism.

The Pakistani-scripted Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73 billion as foreign aid, according to Pakistan’s Economic Survey. But in the period since the Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totalled a staggering $23.3 billion. This figure excludes China’s unpublicized contributions but includes the International Monetary Fund’s $7.6-billion bailout package, released after the Mumbai attacks.

Just last week, Islamabad secured some $5.2 billion in new aid at a donors conference — the first of its kind for Pakistan. At that conference, host Japan and America pledged $1 billion each, while the European Union promised $640 million, Saudi Arabia $700 million, and Iran and the United Arab Emirates $300 million each.

Add to this picture the largest-ever U.S. aid flow for Pakistan, unveiled by the Obama administration — $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years ($1 billion of which was pledged in down-payment at the donors conference in Tokyo), some $3 billion in direct military assistance, plus countless millions of dollars in reimbursements to the Pakistani military for battling jihadists, including those it still nurtures and shields.

Despite the glib talk that the new aid would not be open-ended but result-oriented, the Obama administration first announced major new rewards for Pakistan upfront, and then persuaded other bilateral donors to make large contributions, without defining any specific conditions to help create a more moderate Pakistan not wedded to terrorism. The talk of “no blank cheques” and “an audit trail” has proven little more than spin. Put simply, Islamabad is being allowed to reap a terrorist windfall.

America’s proposed Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act, though, is likely to throw a few bones to those alarmed by the stepped-up assistance as déjà vu. The House version of this innocuously labelled bill seeks to set some metrics for the aid flow, but an opposing White House sees them as too stringent. The Senate version has not yet been unveiled. By the time the bill is passed by both chambers, its focus will likely be on accountability and presidential certification of the Pakistani military’s assistance to help “root out Al Qaeda and other violent extremists in Pakistan’s tribal regions” — the goal publicly identified by President Barack Obama.

In any event, if the benchmarks are not to the White House’s liking, Obama will largely ignore them the way his predecessor dismissed the congressionally imposed metrics for progress on Iraq — metrics that ultimately even Congress disregarded in the face of increased Iraqi violence. The point is that by doling out goodies upfront, Obama has undercut any attempt to get the Pakistani military to stop underwriting terrorist groups.

History actually is repeating itself with a vengeance. It was the multibillion-dollar aid packages in the Reagan years that helped grease Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon. And the renewed U.S. munificence under George W. Bush only encouraged Pakistan to dig itself deeper into the dungeon. Little surprise a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concludes that America, despite its generous aid to Pakistan since 9/11, has “not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA” [Federally Administered Tribal Areas].

At the root of the U.S.-India strategic dissonance on the “Afpak” belt is Washington’s squint-eyed identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, as well as its long-standing pampering of the Pakistani military. The U.S. Congress certainly will not seek to condition the new aid flow to the dismantlement of the state-nurtured terrorist infrastructure in the Pakistani heartland — the staging ground for attacks against India. So, just as the more than $12.3 billion in U.S. assistance to Islamabad since 9/11 only engendered more Pakistani terrorism — with India bearing the brunt — Obama’s plan to shower Pakistan with mammoth new aid will embolden terrorism exporters there and bring Indian security under added pressure.

Still, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been conspicuous by his silence on this and on Obama’s itch to strike a political deal with the Taliban. Rather, he has gratuitously stated: “We have been assured that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands as of now. And I have no reason to disbelieve the assurance”. Who gave that assurance? The answer: Those who are clueless and guileless on Pakistan are seeking to assure India even as they heap rewards on Islamabad and write off Indian security concerns.

Singh’s telling silence, and his earlier refusal to take the mildest diplomatic action against Pakistan over the Mumbai strikes, even as he held that “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” the attacks, underscore the hidden costs of the nuclear deal he rammed through. India’s Pakistan policy stands effectively outsourced.

Singh refrained from taking the smallest of small steps against Pakistan because he believed Washington would help bring the Mumbai-attack planners to justice. Instead, to his chagrin, U.S. officials now are exhorting India to overcome Mumbai and provide Pakistan a tranquil eastern border through troop redeployments, even as non-official Americans are warning that the Indian inaction is bound to bring another major Pakistani-scripted terror attack before long. Like a Rand Corporation report earlier, Stratfor says Indian inaction signals a lack of resolve to deter Pakistan from staging more attacks.

Yet Special Representative Richard Holbrooke blithely pours salt on the Indian wounds. By meretriciously claiming in New Delhi that the U.S., India and Pakistan now face a common threat from terrorism and thus need to work together, Holbrooke sought to make Pakistan’s war by terror against India absolvable and unpreventable — a reality he actually would like India to stoically endure.

Pakistan is not the only failing state in the world. A dysfunctional Somalia, for example, has become the base for increasingly daring piracy along the western rim of the Indian Ocean, seriously disrupting shipping in one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. But even as Somali pirates — with ties to Islamists — now hold 17 captured ships and some 260 hostages, the annual U.S. aid for Somalia is not equivalent to even one day’s aid for Pakistan that the Obama team has helped put together internationally.

The reason Pakistan can harvest tens of billions of dollars by playing the failing-state card is no different from what endeared it to U.S. policy since the 1950s or made it an “all-weather ally” of China. Pakistan remains too useful a pawn for external powers involved in this region. These powers thus are unlikely to let it fail, even as they play up the threat of implosion to bolster the Pakistani state. It’s no wonder Pakistan seems determined as ever to pursue its “war of a thousand cuts” to turn India — with its aging, toothless leadership — into a failed state.

Belittling India

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Chellaney

From Bush love to Obama autograph

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, April 15-30, 2009

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has said he has “great respect” for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but differs “with his policies, particularly his special love for America.” The way Singh rode roughshod over national institutions, including Parliament, and rammed the controversial Indo-U.S. nuclear deal down the country’s throat did create an impression, however specious, that he was beholden to Washington. In fact, Singh has made not a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — even since the much-vaunted deal came to fruition in October 2008.

That silence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the solemn assurances Singh had made to Parliament. What may be even more painful for Singh is that the geopolitical advantages the deal was trumpeted to help usher in — including greater U.S. support for India vis-à-vis China and Pakistan — have been belied by the events since, especially the change of administration in Washington. Consequently, as Singh’s term in office ends, there isn’t much of a legacy he can boast of.

Actually, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya would have been more accurate had he referred to Singh’s “special love” for the U.S. president, whoever the incumbent. That personal foible has been highlighted both by Singh’s April 2 meeting with Barack Obama in London, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, and by his September 25, 2008 joint news conference at the White House with George W. Bush. In London, to the surprise of the Americans present, Singh began his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph for his daughter on a book authored by Obama. Addressing Obama, Singh quoted his daughter as saying: “I would cherish [it] if you could get Mr. Obama to autograph the book.” Singh went on to tell Obama: “You are much loved and respected in India.”

Later that day, when Obama was asked straightforwardly at a news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan,” he began by calling Singh “a wonderful man” and then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Here is Obama showering Pakistan with billions of dollars in additional U.S. aid. But Singh, rather than focus on the Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India, discusses the terrorism challenge “more broadly,” and indeed begins his meeting by seeking Obama’s autograph for his daughter. What happens if Obama’s Pakistan gamble doesn’t pay off?

Now consider Singh’s September 25, 2008 news conference with Bush. Singh started by reading a prepared statement. Almost every paragraph in that ended with a schmaltzy tribute to Bush:

· “And the last four-and-a-half years that I have been prime minister I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India.”

· “In these last four-and-a-half years, there has been a massive transformation of India-United States relations. And Mr. President, you have played a most-important role in making all this happen.”

· “And when history is written I think it will be recorded that President George W. Bush made an historic goal in bringing our two democracies closer to each other.”

· “And when this restrictive regime ends I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.”

· “So, Mr. President, this may be my last visit to you during your presidency, and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you…”

This will go down in history easily as the most-fawning statement ever made by an Indian prime minister about a foreign leader. America and India, the world’s most-powerful and most-populous democracies, need to build close strategic ties, founded on shared political values and mutual respect and understanding. Singh’s record, however, shows he was unable to pursue such an objective without conducting himself in a manner belittling India, even if inadvertently.

For Barack Obama, ignorance is bliss when it comes to the Afpak region

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Chellaney

India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan returns in US policy

From Obama’s call for Indo-Pakistan dialogue to Holbrooke’s second visit in seven weeks, US policy has returned to its traditional position of looking at India through the subcontinental prism while ignoring its security concerns

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 8, 2009

Despite America’s broken policy on Pakistan, President Barack Obama has unveiled the largest-ever US aid package for that country. Indeed, Islamabad is being made the biggest recipient of US aid in the world. If military, non-military and counterinsurgency aid and reimbursements to the Pakistani military were totalled, Pakistan — under Obama’s latest proposals — would overtake Israel and Egypt as the single largest recipient of American aid.

To supposedly mend a wrecked policy, Obama is doing more of what helped create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has decided to shower billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan without even defining benchmarks for judging progress.

Worse yet, the Obama administration has neither acknowledged Pakistan’s role in staging terrorist strikes in India nor made the slightest effort to help bring the Pakistan-based planners of the unparalleled Mumbai attacks to justice. In the detailed, inter-agency “Afpak” policy unveiled by Obama, there is not even a passing mention of Pakistan’s use of proxies to wage a terror war against India. In other words, when Washington refuses to even recognize the problem, can New Delhi really expect the US to be of any help?

In fact, Washington is doing the opposite — making light of Indian concerns vis-à-vis Pakistan by asking New Delhi to adopt a flexible approach toward Islamabad so that the US can win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan front. Put simply, Washington is making short shrift of India’s interests in order to pursue its narrow regional agenda, centred on Obama’s resolve to extricate the US from the war in Afghanistan.

But make no mistake: Obama, through his rewards-in-advance policy, is only emboldening the Pakistani military establishment to continue its war by terror against the Indian republic.

Asked bluntly at his G-20 London summit news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan”, Obama’s reply, while evasively long-winded, was revealing. He began by calling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “a wonderful man”, just as he had described his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, as “marvellous”. But unlike Sarkozy, Singh had begun his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph.

Obama then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Obama went on to say that “at a time when perhaps the greatest enemy of both India and Pakistan should be poverty, that it may make sense to create a more effective dialogue between India and Pakistan.”

This was before he meandered into a professorial sermon on energy efficiency and “reducing our carbon footprint”.

So the question he was asked went unanswered. The truth is that Obama has no intent to help pull India’s chestnuts out of the Pakistan-kindled fire; rather he wants India’s help on his misbegotten Afpak policy. Indeed, that policy is set to make things more difficult for India by reinforcing America’s dependence on the terror-procreating Pakistani military establishment — not only for the transport of the extra war supplies to meet the US military “surge” in Afghanistan, but also for help to negotiate with and co-opt the Afghan Taliban leadership that the Pakistani intelligence has long sheltered in the Quetta area.

How blind Obama and his special representative, Richard Holbrooke, are to the realities on the ground is evident from their separate claims that the hub of terrorism is Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan. Little surprise the Afpak policy paper concludes by saying “the international community must work with Pakistan to disrupt the threats to security along Pakistan’s western border”. Holbrooke, ingenuously, has even linked terror attacks in India to elements operating from that ungoverned border area.

It is past time the Obama team faced up to the fact that the real problem is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan. Rather it is the sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed and export terrorism. None of the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November came from Pakistan’s tribal belt. India is being targeted by Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating from Pakistan’s heartland with the military’s connivance.

Yet the naïveté in Washington is astonishing. Almost every Obama policy assumption has an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Take, for example, the decision to disburse $3 billion in additional military aid to Islamabad in the name of a “Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund”. The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency misses the point that what the Obama administration calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals.

Or take the Obama policy premise that the “surge” can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with the “good” terrorists. This surge-and-bribe assumption overlooks the fact that the Afghan militants, with cosy sanctuaries across the borders, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts.

Also, the new rewards being doled out disregard the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine cooperation at a time when Obama has barely disguised his exit strategy. The generals and their surrogates — the Taliban — just need to patiently wait out the American exit to reclaim Afghanistan.

Through his policy contradictions, Obama has tied himself up in knots. His policy rejects his predecessor’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla”. Yet it proposes $7.5 billion in civilian aid for an increasingly Talibanized Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant.

The upshot of Obama’s blinkered approach is India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan in US policy. This is so evident from Holbrooke’s recurring visits to New Delhi and American calls — from the president down — that India reopen dialogue with Islamabad, even if it has to countenance more Pakistan-scripted terror attacks.

For long, Washington has realized that the best way to handle India is to massage its ego. It was thus claimed that in deference to India’s sensitivities, Kashmir had been removed from Holbrooke’s job description and that his mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt.

In reality, Washington took India and Kashmir out of Holbrooke’s agenda only publicly. As Holbrooke has shown by coming to New Delhi twice in seven weeks — this time with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman — India is very much part of his mandate. In fact, Washington’s proposals for troop reductions and de-escalation clearly bring in the Kashmir dispute.

Obama’s aides contend it is impossible to disentangle Kashmir from any effort to win Pakistani cooperation. So the way forward, they argue, is to work on Kashmir behind the scenes while pretending the issue is not on the agenda.

Still, asked by a Senate committee about tension reduction in Kashmir, Centcom chief, General David Petraeus, admitted last week: “Together with my great diplomatic wing man, Ambassador Holbrooke, this effort actually has started”. And National Security Adviser James Jones, while keeping up the pretence that there is no problem on Pakistan’s eastern side, earlier declared “we do intend to help both countries … build more trust and confidence so that Pakistan can address the issues that it confronts on the western side”.

When India is deeply immersed in an election process, why has Holbrooke come a second time in quick succession, knowing New Delhi is anything but happy about his visit? The reason is that he is using this interregnum to show his turf includes India. But more than a turf-defining mission, what Holbrooke desperately needs is a primer on the roots of terrorism, lest he continue to betray his abysmal ignorance.

Waiting for another Mumbai

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Chellaney

26/11 can happen again

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, April 8, 2009

More than four months after the unparalleled Mumbai terrorist assaults, India has returned to business as usual. It has shied away from the hard decisions it needed to take, yet it set up a new organization of little utility — the National Investigative Agency — whose small staff is still struggling to find office space. Mumbai may have become a terrorist exemplar globally, but in India, there is little evidence it has changed thinking and policy fundamentally, even though it wreaked incalculable damage to the investment and tourism worth of “Brand India.”

India has confronted a continuous Pakistan-waged unconventional war since the 1980s, but to date, it is unable to shed its blinkers, let alone initiate any concrete counteraction to stem a rising existential threat. India is facing war, and yet it continues to debate interminably how it should respond, even as the level of Pakistani asymmetric warfare against it escalates qualitatively and quantitatively.

India has suffered more acts of major terror than any other nation in the 21st century. Still, the debate in India rages as if the last Pakistani act of war was the 1999 Kargil invasion. The blunt truth is that ever since the then Pakistani dictator Zial ul-Haq fashioned the instrument of proxy war against India in the 1980s by taking a page out of the CIA-sponsored covert war against the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been at systematic war with the Indian republic.

Terrorism in general, and especially a foreign state-sponsored proxy war, cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. What India needs is a comprehensive approach that blends different key elements to form a credible counter-terror strategy. Yet, to this day, India has not attempted to even formulate a counterterrorism doctrine.

An excess emphasis on defensive measures only plays into the designs of terrorists and their masters by instilling a siege mentality, underlined by the government’s refusal to take any risks in compelling the Indian Premier League to take its scheduled cricket series overseas. The siege mentality is also evident from the government’s focus on trying to prevent a repeat of the last attack rather than seeking to forestall the next innovative strike. The likelihood of terrorists arriving again on inflatable dinghies and striking luxury hotels is very low. Yet the response to Mumbai has been to set up security cordons around luxury hotels — cordons that any determined band of terrorists can bust.

Actually, on Mumbai, India lost twice over — the first time when 10 Pakistani terrorists held its commercial capital hostage for almost three days, and the second time when Pakistan outmaneuvered it diplomatically. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, strikingly, did not take a single step against Islamabad over the Mumbai attacks — however small or symbolic. Singh thus helped cap India’s response at the level of impotent fury. His focus was almost entirely on containing the domestic political fallout of the attacks.

In that light, it is no surprise that New Delhi has continually watered down its position. Gone is its insistence that Pakistan dismantle its terror infrastructure and allow the Mumbai suspects to be tried in India. With New Delhi having relaxed its pressure, it is pretty likely that the Mumbai masterminds, with their close ties to the Pakistani military leadership, will go scot-free. That in turn is likely to embolden the Pakistani military to sanction another terrorist attack on India that does as much damage as the Mumbai strikes.

Indeed, far from targeting Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as a terrorist organization, Singh naively sought to bolster its credibility by inviting its chief to India after the Mumbai attacks. But for second thoughts in Islamabad, the ISI chief would have landed up in India, to quote the credulous Singh, “to assist in the investigations.” How Singh could have believed that the ISI would lend a helping hand remains a puzzle. Just weeks later, the Indian foreign secretary declared that organizers of the Mumbai attacks and the earlier Indian embassy bombing in Kabul “remain clients and creations of the ISI.”

It is past time New Delhi addressed the glaring disconnect between its shrill rhetoric and inaction by framing a comprehensive counterterrorism doctrine and setting up a unified institution and command to wage war on terrorists and their sponsors. Besides building up its special-forces capabilities, it needs to employ better public relations as a counterterrorism instrument. Also, by quietly undertaking various actions, including at sub-threshold level, India can demonstrate that terrorism no longer is a cost-free option for Pakistan. Washington’s failure to help bring the Pakistan-based Mumbai masterminds to justice, and President Barack Obama’s new plan unveiling the largest-ever annual US aid flow to Islamabad, underscore that India will have to combat terrorism on its own strength.

Dalai Lama: China’s nemesis

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Chellaney

China’s brute power toils against the Dalai Lama’s soft power

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times

On the 50th anniversary of his escape to India, the exiled 14th Dalai Lama stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him and its admission that it is now locked in a “life and death struggle” over Tibet.

Travelling incognito, the Dalai Lama, then 24, crossed over into India on March 30, 1959, after a harrowing, 13-day trek through the Tibetan highlands with a small band of aides and family members. His arrival became public only the following day. Since then, he has come to symbolize one of the longest and most-powerful resistance movements in modern world history. Chinese rule over Tibet has created, as he put it recently, “hell on Earth.”

Little surprise Beijing now treats the iconic Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, with its public references to him matching the crudeness and callousness of its policies in Tibet, where it has tried everything — from Tibet’s cartographic dismemberment and rewriting history, to ethnically drowning Tibetans through large-scale Han migration and systematically undermining Tibetan institutions.

Unnerved that the Dalai Lama’s soft power has stood up to its untrammeled power, China today has taken to haranguing propaganda while enforcing a security lockdown across an increasingly restive Tibetan region, half of which it has hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

With the Dalai Lama having parlayed his international moral standing into an indomitable influence over global public opinion, a desperate Beijing has had to fall back more and more on Cultural Revolution language. Consider one of China’s recent outbursts against its nemesis: “A jackal in Buddhist monk’s robes, an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast. We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique.”

The Dalai Lama gave up his demand for Tibet’s independence more than two decades ago, yet the Chinese propaganda machine still brands him a “splittist” and Premier Wen Jiabao demands he renounce separatist activities, as if China holds a historically and legally incontestable entitlement to Tibet.

The more Beijing has sought to isolate the Dalai Lama internationally, the deeper a thorn he has become in its side. Recently, China bullied its largest African trading partner, South Africa, into barring the Dalai Lama from attending a peace conference in Johannesburg. Yet it faced major embarrassment when the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives passed separate resolutions on Tibet, with the former calling for “real autonomy for Tibet” and the latter demanding Beijing “lift immediately the harsh policies imposed on Tibetans.” Both legislatures backed the Dalai Lama’s initiative for a durable political solution to the Tibet issue.

The Dalai Lama was lucky he fled Tibet in the nick of time before China made him a prisoner. In 1956, when he had travelled to India to participate in the celebrations on the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, the Sinophile Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, convinced him to return to Lhasa, although the Dalai Lama’s advisers feared for his safety. But after his return, conditions in Tibet began to deteriorate relentlessly.

Had he not escaped from the Chinese-guarded Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa on the night of March 17, 1959, disguised as a Tibetan soldier, the Dalai Lama may have met the same fate as the 11th Panchen Lama, who disappeared in 1995 soon after he was anointed at the age of six. The March 10, 1959, Tibetan mass uprising indeed was triggered by popular fears that the Dalai Lama would be kidnapped after he was asked to come to a Chinese army-camp event without bodyguards.

The uprising was harshly suppressed in a year-long bloodbath. And in the period since, more than more than a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives due to official Chinese policies.

In exile, the Dalai Lama has helped keep the Tibetan movement alive and preserved Tibetan language and culture by establishing a network of schools. The transition of the Tibetan government-in-exile to democratically elected executive and legislative branches ought to serve as an example for the autocrats in Beijing. Instead, having turned Tibetans into state serfs under its rule, the communist dictatorship observed a national holiday last Saturday for belatedly discovering that it “emancipated” Tibetans from serfdom through Tibet’s conquest.

Had the Dalai Lama not managed to slip away in 1959, China would have installed an imposter Dalai Lama long ago, in the same way it has instated its own Panchen Lama in place of the official appointee it abducted. But now it has no choice but to wait for the exiled Dalai Lama to pass away before it can orchestrate any sham. To frustrate Beijing’s plans, the present Dalai Lama needs to publicly lay down clear rules on succession.

In fact, it was the long, 17-year gap between the 1933 death of the 13th Dalai Lama and the November 1950 assumption of full temporal powers by the present incumbent at the age of 15, after the Chinese invasion already had started, that cost Tibet its freedom. The hurried installation of the Dalai Lama in political office could not stop China from completing its conquest of Tibet. Because of its protracted power vacuum, Tibet had not sought to reinforce its independence by becoming a United Nations member in the propitious, pre-1949 period when China was politically torn.

A similar long gap in succession and grooming now could strike a devastating blow to the Tibetan cause to regain autonomy. That is why it has become imperative to clarify the rules to choose the 15th Dalai Lama, including whether he is to be discovered in the free world and not in Chinese-controlled Tibet, as the current incumbent had earlier suggested. Another issue that needs to be sorted out is whether the present Karmapa Lama, the third-ranking Tibetan spiritual leader who fled to India in late 1999, can fill in as an unofficial, transitional successor to the Dalai Lama.

For India, Tibet is the core issue with China, which became its neighbor owing not to geography but to guns — by gobbling up the traditional buffer.

The recent congressional resolution recognized India for its “generosity” in playing host to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees. But this is more than just munificence: The Dalai Lama is India’s biggest strategic asset because without him, the country would be poorer by several military divisions against China. India thus has a major stake in the succession issue, including in overseeing the training and education of the heir. For now, though, given the stepped-up Chinese intelligence activities — from cyber to land — Indian security agencies must beware of any plot to assassinate the present incumbent.

The writer, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

The Japan Times: Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Obama’s Afpak plan won’t work

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Chellaney

Fobbing off the burden

Barack Obama’s myopic Afpak plan, with its narrow goals, is bad news for India

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 30, 2009

Throwing more money at Pakistan, without clarity of goals, and keeping up the pretence that Al Qaeda poses the main threat makes Barack Obama look more like George W. Bush than a U.S. president heralding change. Obama has failed to appreciate that the ‘Afpak’ problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from U.S. policies that helped create this terrifying muddle.

Worse still, Obama wants to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism, as if the monster of terrorism can be deftly confined to the Afpak belt — a blinkered approach that promises to bring Indian security under added pressure. His aides contend that by refocusing U.S. power to contain and deter, America can diplomatically encircle the terrorist threats from Pakistan and the Taliban. Distant America may afford this, but next-door India will bear the consequences.

In unveiling an Afpak plan founded on narrow goals, Obama has fallen prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of near-term objectives without much regard for the security of regional friends. To focus entirely on one’s own security, and to give primacy to what is politically expedient, is to repeat the very mistakes of past U.S. policy that inadvertently gave rise to the scourge of jihadist transnational terror.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially created states with no roots in history, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect. Yet Obama’s central objective is not to clean up the mess but to extricate the U.S. from the war in Afghanistan by winning over the bulk of the Taliban, including by pandering to Pakistan, the terrorist procreator and sanctuary provider.

Obama has abandoned the international goal of institution-building in Afghanistan, disparagingly equating it with nation-building. In place of creating a unified, stable, democratic Afghanistan, Obama has defined a short-term mission: “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. But given that Al Qaeda already is badly splintered and weakened and in no position to openly challenge U.S. interests, Obama can declare ‘mission accomplished’ any time he wants. As the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community presented to a Senate committee on February 12 admits, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan … Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago”.

Obama’s lowering of the bar is to facilitate an end to U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan much before he comes up for re-election. And his playing up the threat from Al Qaeda — whose remnants are holed up in mountain caves — helps create room to negotiate a political deal with the more-formidable Taliban.

In what passes for grand strategy, Obama’s plan, in theory, clubs Pakistan (with its militant safe havens) and Afghanistan in a single theatre of operation. But in practice, it follows opposite tracks: Showering billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan and promising not to deploy troops there, while stepping up military operations in Afghanistan to force the Taliban to the negotiating table. It is good though that he wants to build up the size and strength of the Afghan national army — the only institution he has named. But that is to facilitate a U.S. military exit.

To make his plan more presentable, Obama proclaimed “benchmarks and metrics to measure our performance and that of our allies” — Islamabad and Kabul. Yet he shied away from defining the benchmarks or explaining how the stepped-up aid flow to Islamabad will be calibrated to meeting them. As he acknowledged, the benchmarks are yet to be developed by his team, in concert with Congress.

The blunt truth is that by unveiling new rewards for Pakistan upfront, in the form of a quantum jump in aid — even as Washington admits that Islamabad has misused past aid — Obama has undercut his benchmark-setting endeavour. The talk of new “benchmarks and metrics” thus is just public relations to market what otherwise would have been a difficult decision to justify — the tripling of non-military aid to renegade Pakistan while maintaining the existing munificent level of military assistance.

The way to bring a near-bankrupt Pakistan to heel is to threaten suspension of all bilateral and multilateral aid flow — a threat that will have a lightening effect. Yet, Obama first unveils new goodies and then expects the Pakistani intelligence to stop underwriting the Taliban. (He has still to name Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Pakistan-based terror groups that serve as proxies against India.) At a time when Pakistan is most vulnerable to international pressure, including to a threat to place it on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, Obama is reluctant to exercise leverage, proposing instead the largest-ever annual U.S. aid flow to that country. Before long, more lethal, directed-at-India U.S. weapons also will flow to Islamabad — “like whiskey to an alcoholic”, to quote the Indian foreign secretary.

America and India must embed counterterrorism cooperation in an institutional framework so that their collaboration over the Pakistan-scripted Mumbai terror strikes does not prove a one-shot affair. But can such an institutional process be built if America both disregards the interests of India — already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies — and continues to heap rewards on Pakistan without so much as helping to bring the Mumbai-attack planners to justice? Kashmir’s exclusion from Obama’s plan was inevitable, given that Washington’s priority is to reduce its load, not to add more. But having devised his hallucinatory loop of delusion without detailed consultations with India, Obama now wants to co-opt New Delhi in the plan’s implementation, especially by persuading it to emulate his kid-gloves treatment of Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=22084576-ed5b-4623-8a52-b028fdc6807b&Headline=Fobbing+off+the+burden

The unfolding cut-and-run strategy

Posted on March 25, 2009 by Chellaney

Obama’s five-pillar Afpak plan to add to India’s woes

A shortsighted, dangerous Afpak strategy has prompted Washington to extend technical assistance to India over the Mumbai attacks, but not the much-needed political assistance to bring its planners to justice

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 25, 2009

By sketching out in advance five key pillars of his strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese), President Barack Obama has preempted the inter-agency review of US options that he had himself ordered on his most difficult foreign-policy challenge. The review, to be unveiled next Tuesday, will be reduced to a public-relations exercise to market decisions already taken, especially by packaging them in better light and camouflaging their real intent.

The review is set to overlook the central reality on Afghanistan and Pakistan — that the political border between these two artificially-created countries has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two.

Today, that 1893-drawn line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance. A de facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

The momentous disappearance of the Afpak political border seems irreversible. In that light, “Afpak” is a fitting term because by fusing the two countries, it suggests they now need to be tackled as a single geopolitical entity. Yet in the Obama strategy, there is still no meaningful integration in the policy approaches toward the two countries.

In short, Obama is set to cut and run from Afghanistan. As he has told CBS News, “there’s got to be an exit strategy.” He wants to seek re-election on the plank of having ended America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — wars that already have tied up the US military for a period longer than World War II. His timeframe for an Afghanistan exit appears the same as for Iraq — by 2011.

That does not mean that the 190,000 US troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined (including the 17,000 additional forces being sent to Afghanistan) would all be home by 2011-end. Once their missions officially end, some of these troops would be reassigned to military bases Washington intends to maintain indefinitely in the two countries.

The five pillars of Obama’s Afpak strategy are:

● Shift from the current approach of counter-insurgency and institution-building in Afghanistan to a narrower objective to regionally confine terrorism and deter attacks against US interests from the Afpak belt. Having formally ended the global “war” on terror initiated by his predecessor, Obama has no intent to prosecute a regional war on terror in the Afpak belt.

Although in the election campaign Obama repeatedly said the Iraq invasion had diverted US attention from the war of necessity in Afghanistan, he now realizes that defeating Afpak terrorism and building civilian and military institutions to create a stable Afghanistan are long-drawn-out missions that threaten to consume his presidency the way Iraq seared his predecessor’s reign. So he is lowering the bar and seeking shortcuts. Indeed, his defence secretary has described a cohesive, democratic Afghanistan as an impractical objective to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla.”

● Pursue a minimalist “surge” of US forces in Afghanistan as a show of force to pursue political rather than military goals. Obama knows that sending more US forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. After all, the Soviet Union, with 100,000 troops, couldn’t pacify a country that historically has been “the graveyard of empires.” Last year proved the deadliest for American forces in Afghanistan even though the number of NATO and US troops nearly doubled in the first half of 2008.

Ironically, after having been elected on the slogan of change, Obama has set out to do in Afghanistan what his predecessor did in Iraq, where behind the cover of a surge, local tribal chieftains were bought off. The attempt to replicate the Iraq strategy in Afghanistan overlooks several dissimilarities, including the key fact that Sunni insurgents in Iraq — unlike Afghan militants — have had no safe havens across the borders.

● Pretend the badly weakened and splintered Al Qaeda is the main enemy while quietly seeking a political deal with the Taliban leadership. Al Qaeda remnants operate not on the battlefield but furtively out of mountain caves. Those that openly challenge the US and NATO forces are the Taliban and private armies led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others. Yet, the Obama administration has blessed secret negotiations by Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan agencies and individuals with the Taliban and Hekmatyar (who is aligned with the Taliban).

The “reconcilables” (the good terrorists, or what Obama meretriciously calls the “moderate” Taliban) are to be offered amnesty, payoffs and a stake in power. The “unreconcilables” (the bad terrorists) are to be hunted down with the help of the “reconcilables” and eliminated.

To pressure the top Taliban leaders to negotiate and cut a deal, Washington is threatening military strikes on their sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Quetta area. Taliban chief Mullah Omar and members of his supreme shura (council) have been ensconced for years in Quetta under Pakistani intelligence protection, but the US military has thus far not carried out a single air, missile or drone attack on their known hideouts. Obama indeed is agreeable to bring the Taliban shura into the Afghan political fold.

But the Taliban leaders and their main patron, the Pakistani military, know that the US — with a faltering military campaign — is desperate for a ticket out of Afghanistan. All they have to do is to bide their time.

● In the same way the US in the 1980s established the so-called “mujahideen” (the “good” terrorists until they turned on their creators), Washington has unilaterally embarked on a plan to set up local civil militias in every Afghan province. The internationally agreed goal to build institutions is degenerating into militia-building in a country already swarming with heavily armed militiamen.

Long after the US war has ended, the new militias would be terrorizing populations.

● Prop up the Pakistani state, including through a quantum jump in US aid. Just as the imperatives of its covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s prompted the US to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to the latter’s rogue activities, the current overt war is prompting Obama to significantly boost the already-generous level of aid and help the tottering Pakistani state stay solvent. As the CIA steps up cooperation with the Pakistani intelligence, history is repeating itself.

The greater US reliance on the terror-rearing Pakistani military establishment explains why America has extended technical assistance to India in the Mumbai probe, but not political assistance. Washington is unwilling to put pressure on Islamabad to even secure FBI access to those arrested by Pakistani authorities. Four months after the unparalleled terrorist strikes, there is distinct possibility its key planners may go scot-free.

Instead of formulating his Afpak strategy in coordination with allies and friends, Obama is presenting them with a fait accompli even while seeking their cooperation to help implement a plan likely to create a more unstable and terrorist-infested Afpak belt.

Not only is institution-building now being disparaged as nation-building, the new administration also is shifting the military goal. Having failed to rout the Taliban, the US, Obama believes, should return to what it traditionally is good at — containing and deterring.

But the consequence of abandoning the goal to establish a functioning Afghan state and a moderate Pakistan will be greater pressure on Indian security. The brunt of escalating terrorism will be borne by next-door India, which already has been described by ex-US official Ashley Tellis as “the sponge that protects us all.”

China’s eventful year of anniversaries

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Chellaney

Year of big anniversaries: Defining moment for China

Just when China’s internal challenges are being highlighted by major anniversaries this year, a growing U.S. reliance on Chinese capital inflows has prompted Washington to demote human rights

By Brahma Chellaney

Japan Times

Large parts of the Tibetan plateau today have been turned into militarized zones and made off-limits to foreigners. De facto martial law prevails on much of the plateau after the largest troop deployment since the March 2008 Tibetan upheaval.

Yet the more ruthless China is, the more resilient (and innovative) the Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule becomes.

The latest Chinese clampdown began in response to a grassroots Tibetan campaign to boycott celebrations of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and to use the holiday period from Feb. 25 instead to mourn Tibetans who were killed by troops last March and express concern for those arrested or tortured. That a refusal to celebrate a joyous Tibetan event can become a tool of mass protest rattled the autocrats in Beijing, who responded by pouring in troops.

The security lockdown in Tibet also has been prompted by the 50th anniversaries this month of the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese occupation and the Dalai Lama’s consequent flight to India. On March 17, 1959, the then 24-year-old Dalai Lama escaped from the Chinese-guarded Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa. After a harrowing trek through inhospitable terrain, he arrived on March 30 in India, where he has lived in exile ever since.

It was the 49th anniversary of the March 10 revolt that became the trigger for last year’s Tibetan protests — the largest in territorial scale since 1959. This year, thanks to a deliberate Chinese provocation, another anniversary threatens to incite Tibetan disturbances, thus necessitating continued Chinese military presence in full force across the Tibetan plateau.

Like waving a red rag at a bull, China has decided to mark March 28 — the 50th anniversary of its action dissolving the Tibetan government and declaring direct rule over Tibet — as "Serf Emancipation Day," as if China just realized it liberated Tibetans from serfdom 50 years ago.

That anniversary is now to be celebrated every year for bringing — believe it or not — "democratic reform" to Tibet. But what about bringing democratic reform to Han China? That issue will haunt the communist dictatorship in the runup to another anniversary this year — the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre of student-led, prodemocracy demonstrators.

China’s leaders are devoted to celebrating anniversaries to help glorify communist actions. So besides the March 28 celebrations, they have planned a mammoth military parade — the largest ever — along with a repeat of some of the Beijing Olympics glitz at the 60th anniversary of the communist revolution on Oct. 1.

But anniversaries are also precious for the suppressed to catalyze grassroots action and inspire a popular awakening. Luckily for China’s oppressed, it’s raining anniversaries this year. For example, July 22 will mark 10 years since the communist rulers, perceiving a threat even from a nonviolent spiritual movement, banned Falun Gong and set out to arrest and torture thousands of its Han followers, with an undetermined number dying in police custody.

The Chinese Communist Party’s visceral antagonism toward Falun Gong and the brutal official crackdown arose from the movement’s attempt to offer Chinese a spiritual alternative to the state-dispensed religion: communism.

The communist fear of nonviolent ideas is also mirrored in Beijing’s vile attacks against the Dalai Lama, as though he were China’s enemy No. 1. For long, Beijing had denounced the Dalai Lama as a "splittist," as if China has an indisputable ownership over Tibet. But since last year, it has been hurling juicier epithets at him — "a wolf wrapped in monk’s robes," "an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast," and a "serial liar."

Such foul language against the Tibetan god-king comes from a party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the "Great Leap Forward," "Cultural Revolution" and other state-induced disasters. The greatest genocide in modern history was not the Holocaust but the Great Leap Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million people dead, according to Tombstone, a recent book by longtime Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

Nothing scares those wedded to violence more than ideas of peace, reconciliation and nonviolent dissent. Little surprise the party has been unnerved by Tibetans turning the Losar festival into a dirge to memorialize those killed by Chinese forces.

At a critical juncture, unfortunately, the United States, out of strategic compulsion, is willing to turn a blind eye to growing Chinese human-rights abuses. With U.S. President Barack Obama’s stimulus package making America even more reliant on its banker, China, to finance a budget deficit now officially set to reach $1.75 trillion, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it easy for Chinese repression to continue by publicly demoting human rights.

While thanking China for underscoring the "intertwined" nature of the U.S. and Chinese economies through continued purchases of U.S. government debt, she went out of her way during her recent Beijing visit to demote human rights and emphasize economic, environmental and security relations. With Japan no longer buying U.S. Treasury bills, whose 10-year yield currently is just 2.84 percent, China has emerged as America’s main creditor.

U.S. foreign policy indeed is veering to the view that Asian stability and China’s own rise can best be managed by building a stronger cooperative relationship with Beijing and respecting Chinese sensitivities.

A more indulgent U.S. policy can help mitigate international pressures on Beijing. But China’s internal challenges are set to grow. And 2009 is fraught with politically treacherous anniversaries for a nominally communist party that seeks to perpetuate its political monopoly in an explosively capitalist country.

Even the leadership’s plan to re-enact Olympic-style celebrations at the Oct. 1 anniversary of the establishment of communist China threatens to renew some of the controversies that plagued the Beijing Games and stir up protests and security-related concerns. Such grand revelry risks provoking critics.

The 90th anniversary on May 4 of the 1919 student-led revolt against imperial rule is symbolically important, too, because it is a potent reminder to the present leadership that people can turn against their rulers when they become impervious to popular concerns. After all, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were modeled on the 1919 movement.

Add to the picture Beijing’s attempt to incite Tibetans by observing as "Serf Emancipation Day" the date when Tibetans lost even the pretense of autonomy. By seeking to turn into a national celebration an anniversary that actually marks China’s formal betrayal of its May 1951, postinvasion "17 Pacts" promising autonomy to Tibet, the leadership has sought to provoke Tibetans at a time when the wounds from last year’s bloody events are still to heal.

This underlines the propensity of a power-drunk leadership to pursue counterproductive policies — the very predisposition that could unravel the world’s oldest autocracy in Beijing.

After China’s 2008 coming-out party, this year of anniversaries could prove a turning point in Chinese history, with even the state-run Outlook magazine warning of "a peak period for mass incidents." Little surprise a high-powered special committee constituted by President Hu Jintao to prevent disorder is known as Committee 6521, an order of numbers representing this year’s 60th, 50th, 20th and 10th anniversaries of big events. The economic slowdown, rising unemployment and social tensions, and new signs of restiveness threaten to trigger events whose own anniversaries may become major occasions of observance.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: March 12, 2009

Sri Lankan bloody crescendo

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Chellaney

Dangerous games

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, March 9, 2009

The 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka has built up to a bloody crescendo. Yet the killing of a growing number of non-combatants and the plight of large numbers of displaced or trapped Tamils has generated a muted international response.One country, however, continues to make hay while Asia’s longest civil war rages on little-noticed battlefields.

In Sri Lanka, as in Burma, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia and elsewhere, China has been an abettor of human-rights abuses. Chinese military and financial support has made possible Colombo’s no-holds-barred campaign to score a decisive military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

But with secretary of state Hillary Clinton publicly emphasising that the global financial, climate and security crises are more pressing priorities for US policy than China’s human-rights record, Beijing has little reason to stop facilitating overseas what it practices at home –repression.

Sri Lanka is just the latest case underlining China’s blindness to the consequences of its aggressive pursuit of strategic interests. No sooner had the US ended direct military aid to Sri Lanka last year over its deteriorating human-rights record than China stepped in to fill the breach — a breach widened by India’s hands-off approach towards Sri Lanka since a disastrous 1987-90 peace-keeping operation there. Beijing started selling larger quantities of arms, and dramatically boosted its aid fivefold since 2008 to almost $1 billion to emerge as Sri Lanka’s largest donor.

In recent months, Chinese Jian-7 fighterjets, anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons have played a central role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers. Beijing has even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Sri Lanka.

At Beijing’s prodding, Pakistan –despite its own faltering economy and internal disorder — has boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision guided attacks.

China has become an enabler of repression in a number of developing nations as it seeks to gain access to oil and mineral resources to market its goods and to step up investment. Still officially a communist state, its support for brutal regimes is driven by capitalist considerations. But while exploiting commercial opportunities, it also tries to make strategic inroads.

Little surprise thus that China’s best friends are pariah or other human rights-abusing states. Indeed, with its ability to provide political protection through its UN Security Council veto power, Beijing has signed tens of billions of dollars worth of energy and arms contracts in recent years with such problem states — from Burma and Iran to Sudan and Venezuela.

In the case of Sri Lanka, China has been particularly attracted by that country’s vantage location in the centre of the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for trade and oil. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Chinese engineers are now building on Sri Lanka’s southeast — is the latest "pearl" in China’s strategy to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans by assembling a "string of pearls" in the form of listening posts, special naval arrangements and access to ports.

While Beijing has aggressively moved in recent years to construct or modernise ports in the Indian Ocean rim, none of the port-building projects it has bagged in recent years can match the strategic value of Hambantota, which sits astride the great trade arteries.
China’s generous military aid to Sri Lanka has tilted the military balance in favour of government forces, enabling them to unravel the de facto state the Tigers had run for years.

After losing more than 5,600 square kilometres of territory, the Tigers now are boxed into a sliver of jungle area in the northeast. But despite the battlefield triumphs, the government is unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the Tamils’ long-standing grievances. The Tigers, after being routed in the conventional war, are gearing up to return to their roots and become guerrilla fighters again.

With an ever-larger, Chinese-aided war machine, the conflict is set to grind on, making civil society the main loser. That is why international diplomatic intervention has become imperative.

India, with its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout over a war-hemorrhagic Sri Lankan economy that is in search of an international bailout package, must use its leverage deftly to promote political and ethnic reconciliation rooted in federalism and genuine inter-ethnic equality.

More broadly, the US, European Union, Japan and other important players need to exert leverage to press Beijing to moderate its unsettling role and to make Colombo accept a ceasefire.

The writer is a strategic affairs expert.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1237549

A flawed Afpak strategy

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Chellaney

Why U.S. policy risks repeating history

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu March 3, 2009

In setting out to deal with the Afghanistan-Pakistan predicament, Barack Obama is seeking to repeat some of the very Reagan-era mistakes that created this mess

At a time when the Taliban, with its inner shura (council) ensconced in the Quetta area, is making deeper inroads into Pakistan, U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese) raises fundamental questions: Is Washington serious about solving what it helped bring about? And can a solution involve doing more of what caused the problem?

The Obama administration has set out to train and arm local militias in every Afghan province, even as Defence Secretary Robert Gates has triggered alarm bells by declaring in Krakow, Poland, that the U.S. “would be very open” to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Faced with grim realities on the ground, the new administration is seeking to pursue shortcuts, lest Afpak burn Mr. Obama’s presidency in the same way Iraq consumed George W. Bush’s. Still, it is important to remember the origins of the Afpak problem.

A covert U.S. war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan helped instil an Afpak jihad culture and create Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. It was at a mid-1980s White House ceremony attended by some turbaned and bearded Afpak “holy warriors” that President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “mujahideen” leaders the “moral equivalent of the founding fathers” of America. Now a second military intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 — this time by the U.S., with the aid of NATO and other allied troops — has further destabilised the region.

Yet, in trying to salvage the overt U.S. war in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is ignoring the lessons of the earlier covert war and unwittingly seeking to repeat history. In the same way the U.S. created “mujahideen” by funnelling billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington has now embarked on a plan to set up local militias across Afghanistan. And just as the covert war’s imperatives prompted the U.S. in the 1980s to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to its nuclear-smuggling and other illicit trans-border activities, Washington is now unveiling a quantum jump in aid to that country while seeking to neither bring the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence under civilian oversight nor subject the recently-freed A.Q. Khan to international questioning.

While pursuing major changes domestically, Mr. Obama is demonstrating a degree of caution that makes his foreign policy look like a repackaged version of Mr. Bush’s. Besides retaining Mr. Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, the once anti-war Mr. Obama is in less of a hurry to exit Iraq, with his full troop withdrawal to be completed in 2011 in accordance with Mr. Bush’s plan. While asking his aides to come up with an Afpak strategy before he goes to Europe for the April 2 NATO summit, Mr. Obama has already made key decisions — from sending more troops to Afghanistan to pushing ahead with new civilian militias. In Pakistan, U.S. cooperation has been stepped up with the military, including new joint CIA-ISI missions in tribal areas, commando training to Frontier Corps and sharing of U.S. intercepts of militant cellular and satellite phone calls.

Under the militia-building plan, designed to complement Mr. Obama’s troop “surge,” lightly trained militias are being set up in the Afghan provinces as part of a supposed game-changing strategy. The first such militia units are almost ready to be rolled out in Wardak province, near Kabul. The costs to the U.S. to train and maintain such provincial militias will depend on how many recruits the programme is able to draw. But the financial costs can only be small compared to the likely costs to regional security.

The plan, initiated quietly without any consultation with allies and partners, flies in the face of the common agreement that the international community must focus on institution-building, demobilisation of existing militias and reconstruction to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — goals that have prompted India to pour massive $1.2 billion aid into that country and start constructing the new Afghan Parliament building. The decision ignores the danger that such militias could go out of control and threaten international security. That is exactly what happened with the militias Reagan heavily armed in the 1980s, the so-called “mujahideen.”

Before long, the new militias would be terrorising local populations. Today, America is unable to stop the misuse of its large annual military aid by Pakistan or account for the arms it has supplied to Afghan and Iraqi security forces. Controlling non-state actors is even harder. That is the lesson from the rise of the Taliban, fathered by the ISI and endorsed by U.S. policy as a way out of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after President Najibullah’s 1992 ouster.

Prodded by the intense lobbying of Unocol, a U.S. firm that was seeking to build energy pipelines from Turkmenistan, the Clinton administration called the Taliban’s 1996 ascension to power “an opportunity for a process of national reconciliation to begin.” Some 13 years later, as if no lesson has been learned from the Taliban’s rampages, Secretary Gates has used the same term “reconciliation” to suggest compromise with that rabidly Islamist militia.

To be sure, building civilian and military institutions to recreate a unified, stable Afghanistan out of the ashes of three decades of war is not easy. But the shortcuts Mr. Obama is seeking are likely to impose enduring costs. Just because Afghan security forces are not yet sufficiently large or adequately groomed to take over the fight cannot justify the setting up of more militias in a country already swarming with armed militiamen. When the United Nations-sponsored programme to disarm and demobilise existing militias is in limbo, the move to create new militia units in the name of an “Afghan Public Protection Force” risks seriously undermining the secular Afghan national army and triggering more ethnic and sectarian bloodletting.

The real threat today is from the disparate militias that have been at loggerheads in the past but now oppose foreign intervention. The insurgency is made up of the ragtag Taliban — oiled by drug money and petrodollars — and a number of private armies, including Jalaluddin Haqqani’s militia force, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi. To create more armed militiamen is to play with fire.

Just as the Pakistani army and the ISI served as America’s most critical eyes and ears in the 1980s’ covert war, U.S. logistics and intelligence dependence on them in the current overt war is being reinforced by several factors — a troop surge to steady a faltering military campaign; the desire to cut a deal with the Taliban; and the recent Kyrgyz decision to shut down the American air base at Manas, a major hub for troops and cargo to Afghanistan. Despite the Manas loss, Mr. Obama, at this stage, is unlikely to seriously explore the only possible alternative he has to greater U.S. reliance on Pakistan: Do a deal with Tehran to gain access to Afghanistan through the Iranian port of Chabahar and the Indian-built Zaranj-Delaram highway, which links up to the ring road to Kandahar and Kabul.

If Richard Holbrooke’s appointment as special representative is not merely intended to sell decisions already made in Washington, such as to set up militias and increase troop levels, genuine prior consultations with partners and friends are essential, or else Mr. Obama would be following Mr. Bush’s much-criticised footsteps. Yet Mr. Obama made his first presidential telephone call to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to merely convey an Afghanistan-related decision he had already made — to send 17,000 more U.S. troops.

In fact, while pampering the Pakistani military establishment that is working to undermine the civilians in power, the U.S. is undercutting the present civilian government in Kabul by directly reaching out to provincial governors and seeking their help, among other things, to establish militias. While Mr. Gates scoffs at a cohesive, stable, democratic Afghanistan as “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla,” Mr. Obama is itching to dump Mr. Karzai. Mr. Obama’s scaled-back objective is not to rout the Taliban but, as he told a joint session of Congress, “to defeat al-Qaeda.”

The Afpak problem won’t go away without a clear break from failed U.S. policies and unceasing investments in institution-building. Continuing more of what hasn’t worked in the past, such as throwing more money at Pakistan and pouring more foreign troops into Afghanistan without a sustained commitment to uproot terrorism, is like feeding the beast. A U.S. deal with the Taliban will not only repeat history, but also reinforce Afpak’s position as a global narco-terrorist beachhead.

Building institutions and defeating transnational terrorism, of course, are long-drawn-out missions. But Mr. Obama wants to demonstrate change in keeping with his election-campaign slogan. That means giving priority to what is politically expedient than to long-term interests — the very mistake that gave rise to the phenomenon of jihadist transnational terror. It also means redefining success and taking shortcuts, including using the troop surge as a show of force to cut grotty deals and rear new armed thugs. “Surge, bribe and run” sums up Mr. Obama’s unfolding strategy. Little surprise Pakistani generals are smiling.